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Category Archives: Opinion
Managing scientific data: when bits need babysitters
If a tree falls in a forest, and a microphone picks it up and uploads the recording to an obscure archive where no one ever listens to it, does it make a sound? Philosophical matters aside, questions like this point to one of the central challenges facing the natural sciences in the information age. Thanks to improvements in data collection technologies over the years, scientific data in many fields is being generated at astronomically higher rates than in the past. Although this sounds like good news (and I doubt that the data-starved scientists of yesteryear would be complaining much), researchers often find themselves struggling to keep pace with the deluge of information. The question we must confront is how to design a system in which vast influxes of data can be efficiently accessed, vetted and analyzed by scientists around the globe.
Blurring the line between man and machine
Human beings are a wonderful species, indeed. We’ve got the ability to think critically in difficult situations, to be flexible in the face of great adversity and challenge, and to create systems that were previously unthinkable. Our brains seem to be nature’s ultimate machine, a unique network of neurons in a storm of electrical activity. This fantastic assemblage of complex components has been the sole occupant of the throne of “consciousness” (whatever that is) for thousands of years now. However, our tenure as the known universe’s only sentient beings may be coming to an end.
This concept was recently discussed in an article in The Atlantic. Written by Brian Christian, a bona-fide flesh-and-blood human (honest), it covers one of the oldest questions facing humanity: what makes us special?
You can’t spell “prescience” without “science”
On April 6, 2009, there was an earthquake in L’Aquila, Italy; 308 people were killed. Six days before that, on March 31, there had been a meeting of the Commissione Grandi Rischi (“Major Risks committee”) in L’Aquila, which concluded that a major quake was unlikely. Members of the committee were indicted the following year on manslaughter charges for not warning the citizens of L’Aquila to evacuate. This story contains an important lesson for any scientist, or at least some important food for thought. What exactly is our responsibility to society, when it comes to predicting the future?
Why empiricism will always be imperfect
A new year is upon us, and that’s always a great time to clean out the skeletons in your closet. So without further ado, let’s take a look at Jonah Lehrer’s explanation of “the decline effect” (published in The New Yorker last month). Lehrer describes this odd phenomenon whereby statistical significance of previous scientific findings seems to decrease with age, as we get further and further away from the time that it was initially reported in literature.
As any scientist can tell you, the holy grail of an experiment is a low p-value, a statistical measure that tells whether your findings are indicative of an actual effect, not just randomness and chance. This sounds fairly straightforward – of course we want to find things of actual importance, rather than being lulled into a false discovery by arbitrary data – but it turns out to be much hazier than a simple “yes” or “no.”
Shedding light on the supposed link between MMR and autism
Editors note: With today’s post, we introduce a new category of “Opinion” posts on the BSR blog. We continue to welcome informative posts about scientific research, as well as posts that give an individual author’s point of view on controversial subjects. Please send any feedback or post contributions to sciencereviewblog [at] gmail [dot] com.
-Anna
As you may have noticed in the past few months (if not years), there is quite a bit of concern about the possible link between autism and vaccinations. If you were to look at almost any properly carried out independent study, you’d find that most of these allegations are completely ridiculous. Nevertheless, sensational claims seem to have a knack for outshining the factual evidence that contradicts them. The autism/vaccination “link” has caused a number of parents to intentionally avoid vaccinations for their children, resulting in a number of unnecessary deaths, including the recent outbreak in whooping cough in California.
It all started with a paper written by Andrew Wakefield in 1998. In the paper, he describes a number of children who had recently undergone vaccination for MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) and supposedly began showing signs of autism shortly thereafter. The author suggested that the MMR vaccine was causing these children to develop their symptoms.
Twelve years and who knows how many un-vaccinated children later, we finally get…
Survival of the kindest
Have you heard the latest news out of the Greater Good Science Center? What’s that, you say? You didn’t know that UC Berkeley had a Greater Good Science Center? In a town whose reputation is already firmly in the “touchy-feely” category, there is a group of psychologists and sociologists studying how to make people happier. The video explains it all:
As a former would-be sociologist, I feel a fond nostalgia for the notion of compassion as a tonic for society’s ills. The main goal of the researchers at Greater Good is to show that kindness and cooperation are better survival strategies than competition and selfishness.
Funding science in a slow economy
Early last week, Senators Tom Coburn (R- Oklahoma) and John McCain (R- Arizona) released a report entitled “Summertime Blues: 100 stimulus projects that give taxpayers the blues.” Among the projects highlighted in the report, there are a number of research studies funded by the National Science Foundation from their portion of last year’s stimulus funds (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act). Of the $862 billion total dispersed by Congress, the NSF received $2 billion specifically for “research and related activities.” NSF chose to use these funds for highly rated proposals that had already been submitted for review, but which would otherwise have gone unfunded due to budget constraints.
Let me be clear from the beginning: it is not the goal of this blog to take any political stance. Our main interest is science, and science is not an inherently political pursuit. The opinions of policy-makers are not directly relevant to our pursuit of truth about the natural world.
